Happy Birthday to me!!!

This time, again, I was in Chennai to celebrate my birthday, last weekend.

The day was just like any other day, with the only difference that I got more calls than the number of calls put together in a whole year. In fact, my birthday is the only day when people call me. And I am thankful for that. At least they remember that someone called Deepa does exist in this world.

The crowning glory was that I was on roaming and the conversations were getting longer than usual ‘coz there was a lot to talk and get updates on things happening with each other.

My landline was out of order, as usual. My mom went to the office and my dad had some work outside, so I couldn’t give their number to receive the calls.

And everyone promised that they would call later. I’m still waiting for their calls. Hope they will remember to fulfill their promise before my birthday next year.

I was toying with the idea of postponing my Chennai trip considering the fact that it was raining heavily last week and also the forecast had predicted rains till Monday. But then, I thought lets take the risk - getting drenched in rain, catching cold and things like that. Mother Nature was very kind to me and kept the day time comparatively sunny and rain free, though I didn’t go out anywhere fearing sudden showers n messy roads.

And right when I was getting ready to leave, the Rain Gods starting shedding their precious tears, bidding me adieu… at least that’s how I consoled myself.

On Monday, I reached Bangalore by 4.45 a.m. only to find that the prepaid auto counter was closed. The auto drivers were having their own way asking 3 times the actual fare.

A few people like me were waiting in the queue, hoping the counter would open anytime.

Some auto drivers were even enacting a small drama, their style:
Driver 1: Hey, don’t you know the prepaid counter won’t open today?
Driver 2: Oh no! I didn’t know that…

Somehow I managed to get an auto and reached my PG around 5.15 a.m. Since the gate was locked, I had to call up Aunty to open the gate. Surprisingly, the auto driver waited and left only after someone came at the gate to open it.

I was confused if it was indeed a kind gesture on his part or was he trying to check if I really stayed there. Ghor Kalyug! Even if people were really good, we tend to suspect their intentions. I guess it is because such things are too good to be true these days.

There was another surprise waiting for me in my room. My roomies gifted me with a beautiful watch and a cute little pen stand with a teddy hugging it tightly. I have placed the teddy stand on my desk at office. I found it as the perfect place to keep my good old mobile.

And the watch… hope my good times have started!!!

Weekends

Weekends have become more significant than being merely 2 days of a week.

Every Monday you get mails saying that there are 5 more days to go for the weekend to come again. And every Friday morning greets you with happy faces in your office beaming with rays of “Thank God it is Friday”.

When I think of it, Saturdays and Sundays were never so important before in my life. Now, they are the only days when I get to connect with my soul which was left far behind in the fast and hectic pace of work life and also some time for myself.

Questions like “So… what’s the plan for the weekend?” and “How was your weekend?” have become so common like “How are you?” “How’s life?”

My husband takes up most of my time during the week days and I get little or no time at all to be with my boyfriend .That’s the reason why the weekends are so special to me.

And now that my office is shifted to Whitefield, my day begins at 5 a.m. and ‘should ‘end by 10p.m else I would miss my only source of transportation to my place of work.

Everything in my life apart from my job gets crammed up in those 48 hrs.( 32 waking hrs. to be precise)-shopping, movies, meeting friends, music classes...phew!

And the sad part is that these two days are the only times in the entire week which pass by you faster than a lightning. Before you know it, you wake up on a Monday morning and are on your way to the office again, dreaming of the next weekend.


Note:
My husband-my job :(
My boyfriend-my blog :)

Thoughts and Tears

One of my pastimes when I’m at home in Chennai is to sit on my house terrace and bask under the usually moonlit, starry and breezy, late night… just close my eyes, be a mute spectator to the random thoughts in their Brownian motion of my fluid memory. The randomness lies in the flow of the thoughts, which bring a smile on my face one moment, making its way to a tear or two the next second and again giggles of uncontrollable laughter vanishing into the redness of anger.

It is really very relaxing to just let my emotions free and let them run around like wild horses with me enjoying and reliving the moments again. And one would find me crying at that time. Those tears are neither of pain nor of joy. I feel they are simply a means of cleansing the mind, taking all the pains and sorrows with them as they flow down my cheeks leaving their salty streaks behind. They leave a sense of calmness in me.

I miss those moments here. I want more of solitude. But most of the time I find loneliness (in crowd). I can’t afford to drown in my thoughts because that would make people really question my sanity if they were to see me smile, laugh and cry all alone.

My experiments with Sports.

Sports and I are poles apart. The only day in my school when my heart clangs like huge cymbals with fear is on the Sports Day.

I don’t remember what kind of events I used to participate when I was a kid. But the day when I played kho-kho when I was in fifth std. is still clear as a bright sunny day in my memory.

It is really funny when I think of it now.

People assume that I can run just because I’m tall. And the next moment I find myself amidst a group of girls and boys, full of team spirit, shouting and screaming and cheering their teams. Well, I didn’t know the rules of the game. And even when I enquired, I was told that if I run and give kho to a team member to catch the opponent team member, that would be good enough.
And I thought that, when I’m running, the sole responsibility of catching the opponent was on my shoulders and I had to do my best to catch her. I forgot the ‘kho-giving’ part. So, I ended up running between poles, as the girls from the other team kept hopping from one side to another and the girls from my team begging me to give them kho. And I would give in, giving kho to any girl who has been requesting for a long time.

Obviously, we didn’t win that match. But before you think I was a loser, let me tell you, we did win the junior level kho-kho match. Because, by then I understood that giving kho would help me prevent wasting my energy unnecessarily. The first prize certificate laminated with pride lies safely in my folder now.

In my later school years, I would escape somehow from participating in kho-kho. The screaming of girls and the sizzling heat of enthusiasm freaks me out and I just can’t stand there with my heart ticking like a time bomb, as if it is going to burst any moment if I don’t leave that place immediately.

Another sports day I remember is when I was in my 12th std. It was the 1500 mts. race.
I was in the Diamond house. When the race was about to begin, we found that there was no participant from our house. In order to save the grace of our house, my friend and I participated in it. We didn’t aim to win. Participation is all that matters. With that spirit, we entered the race. And the worst part is, I lost count of how many laps I had completed. I still wonder if I had run an extra lap and hence lost the race and my shoe( which tore at the end of the race).

The only thing that consoled me was that I ran 1500 mts. and did manage to complete the race. And that was the first time I was running in a race. Not bad, huh?

You’ve got mail-The End.

How would you react if you were reading your forward mails as usual and you get a warning message in bold letters saying,” You have been using your official mail for personal purpose. This has been noted by the company.” You click Ok. And it continues, “A copy of your inbox is being taken as a proof and will be reported to the HR.” You click OK again. The progress bar shows the status of copying the inbox. “The inbox has been copied.”

I first thought it was some kind of a prank. When I saw my machine name too in the message, I hit the panic button. Sirens were blowing in my head. I was scared that the HR would come in search of me or call me to ask why I was using my mailbox for sending personal mails. I could not think of any convincing answer to that question which was, by now, stabbing my “professional ethics” with a huge, sharp spear.

My brain was rattling with numerous questions …
What if my rating goes down because of it?
What if I was thrown out of the company for such a silly reason?
Are they really keeping a watch on everyone’s mail box?
Then would they be able to read my mails too?
Or is there some automatic setting in the mail client that this should be done when the no. of mails sent to n fro goes beyond some limit.
Am I the only one to receive this warning?
Why didn’t the others get the same warning?
Then am I the only one sending such huge no. of forwards?
No one ever told me about this rule before. .. was it mentioned in the company mail policy? Or I never read it properly?

I was even thinking of moving all my personal mails into some folder and keeping all the official mails in the inbox so that even if someone does come to check my inbox (something like what happens in my college.. the black n white “squads” check the students’, including girls’, bags to see if we have mobiles as we are not allowed to bring mobiles to the college.)

But then, the hard fact hit me that the proof was already taken and I couldn’t do anything about it now.

I was helplessly opening the forward mails I was getting and the very thought of forwarding them to others brought all those questions back in my already cluttered head.

I was wondering why I always fall in such trouble which nobody else has ever heard of or experienced and coming out of which seems very improbable.

I was so scared that I couldn’t even reply to one of my friend’s mail in which he had asked if I was on leave (considering the fact that he hadn’t received a single mail from me).I feared someone was monitoring my mailbox.

At last, only in the evening I gathered some left-over courage within my panic-stricken heart and asked about it to my team mate (we were in the same training batch when we joined work). I was relieved to hear that he too had got the same warning. At least I’m not alone in this weird problem. He felt that it was because of some mail we had received from a batch mate that morning. I got the warning when I was trying to open a mail (which I suspected of being the cause of it all) but still couldn’t believe that it was all a prank ‘coz that mail hadn’t opened by then.

On enquiring about it with my friends in office the next day, I found the culprit mail. The mail had an attachment, an exe file, which on running just showed up a message box which said “Hi”. The file was very small, around 8 or 10 kb. Usually, exe files are very large in size. I had wondered what kind of an attachment was that… it did nothing. Only later did I come to know that it had done everything to make someone stop forwarding mails altogether.

I thought of taking sweet revenge on all my other friends and forwarded it to all of them. One of them called me up to check if the warning was because of the mail. Another friend feared that the message was because of her overflowing inbox and deleted all the mails, including all her favourite forwards and mails, which she had saved over a long time.

This was just another light hearted prank. But I realized the graveness of the situation when a friend told me about a person who was fired because he had violated the client’s mail policy by subscribing to his college groups and receiving so many forwards to his official mail id.

The result of it all… I don’t send forward mails anymore.

You’ve got mail!

Sometimes, when work gets so boring that you feel strangulated within the comforts of your very own cozy seat in your cubicle a.ka your ‘home-away-from-home’, the one thing that comes to your rescue is your mail inbox.

I am sure all ‘software engineers’ especially the ones who have joined this industry recently know what I mean.

The alert that pops up and the ‘ding’ announcing the royal arrival of a new mail into my inbox makes my heart leap with joy and I can’t resist myself from opening my inbox to see one of the many forward mails my friends send me.

While some mails bring you some cool or funny video clip, others bring some puzzles which are supposedly solvable only by highly intelligent people. Some are forwards appealing for help (most of them doing the umpteenth round around the cyber world) and there are others giving you some thought for the day. If one forward is one of those clichéd friendship messages, another one is really very sweet and makes you think of all the good friends you have. Few mails bring you the PJs of the year and few others are one of the best jokes you have ever heard or read.

Whenever I’m stuck with a buggy code, I just stroll around in my garden of these colorful mails and it gives me a fresh perspective and helps me resolve the problem. Actually, anything you do to distract yourself from the grinding work for a moment helps you a lot to get back to it with rejuvenated energy. And checking mails is the easiest way to do so.

There are days when I don’t get any forwards for a very long time and I begin to panic, wondering if there is some problem with my mail client. I keep refreshing my inbox again and again, with my eyes glued to the progress bar showing 20%...50%...70%...100%... and me anxiously waiting for a new mail to show up in the inbox.

And there are some days when I have just read a mail and moved it to some folder, when suddenly another mail waits eagerly for me to open it, read and then either save or forward it depending on how busy I am with my work.

It is sometimes true that a software engineer + joblessness = forward mails.
My presence in the office is known to my friends only when they get forwards from me. I even get mails like “What happened?” if there are no forward mails. A friend once asked me whether I came late to the office because he got my mail only in the afternoon.

Ding!

Sigh! Life of a software engineer…

Teenage life!

It is always a time for laughter and cheerfulness when I am at my aunt’s home. My 11-year-old cousin is the source of amusement and I keep giggling at everything she says or does.

The other day when I had been there, my aunt and mom had gone for shopping and we both were alone at home. We were getting bored, so I asked her to tell about her class.

She thought for sometime and exclaimed,” Yea! I will tell you this incident.” and continued,” There is this girl in my class. One day she asked a boy, who was absent for some days, ‘Why were you absent for so many days. Are you feeling fine?’ to which the boy replied sadly,’ No, I’m not feeling fine.’
The girl innocently asked,’ Why da? What happened?’
The boy said,’ Every night you come in my dream and tell I love you. That’s why.’”

I burst out laughing and wanted to know what happened after that.

It seems the girl gave one tight slap on the poor boy’s cheeks and the entire class started laughing at him. And the young Romeo started crying.

My cousin went on to narrate another incident that happened in her class on the Valentine’s Day. A boy had brought a red rose that day. During the lunch break, he called a girl to tell her something. Curious, she and her gang of friends went near him to know why he was calling her. The boy gave her the rose and said, ’I love you’.

I wanted to know how this girl reacted to it. It seems this girl burst into tears.

My cousin’s opinion: What the first girl did was right. That boy deserved the slap!

Her neighbour who is just one year older to her, seems to be learning to see the world through rose tinted glasses at this young age. She has begun to realize that ‘ Love is great!’. I really don’t understand what makes her say that, but it seems she has told my cousins that she feels like falling in love with every other guy she meets.

Such things did happen in my class too when I was their age. It started around the time we were in the 7th std. Once, a girl confessed her love to a boy only to get blasted by him. A few months later, she asked for another boy’s heart on his birthday. It was really amusing to see people falling for their classmates and some senior boys falling for the girls in my class. Teenage!

Those are the most memorable times of one’s life. Every emotion and experience seems so new.

This is the time when you start talking back to the very parents who taught you to speak.

You discover a new person inside yourself.

You fall for someone who is one among the ordinary people you meet in your life and one fine day, he/she becomes the special person for whom your heart flutters.And the whole world seems to be a happy place to live in. Now, why so many people seem special to you at this age is just beyond human comprehension. But then, if it keeps you in that rosy mood, who cares for the explanation?

And yea, this is the time when whatever the elders say seems like a lecture and we realize it much later in life that it all made sense, after all. That too, when you are imparting the same piece of advice to a younger sibling or cousin or your child. Everything that seemed reasonable at that age seems so crazy now.

Being at the other end of teenage, it is really enlightening to see that every teenager thinks and feels the same way irrespective of the generation they belong to.